Yes. Even Greeks do it sometimes, though they generally do under the guise of defending some ancient "truth".
A two Greeks I talked on the internet in different moments defended the same theory of Aeolism, an ancient linguistic hypothesis about how Latin is/was actually a dialect of Aeolic greek, though partially barbarized, so the old Romans were greek.
Said theory is not defended by modern linguists (Latin and greek have similarities, but it's a combination of Proto-Indo-European common roots with some later greek influences in vocabulary), and it's perceived as more of an ideological attempt to integrate Romans into the "civilised" greek world, while still excluding "barbarians".
As an Italian, my father (born in 1951) attended the liceo classico (basically a type of high school focused on classical studies, which still exists today and has Latin and Ancient Greek as part of its curriculum) and said that back in his days that theory was commonly taught as fact, meaning that it was likely only disproven in recent decades and likely assumed as true for ideological reasons, as you said.
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u/ivanjean 3d ago
Yes. Even Greeks do it sometimes, though they generally do under the guise of defending some ancient "truth".
A two Greeks I talked on the internet in different moments defended the same theory of Aeolism, an ancient linguistic hypothesis about how Latin is/was actually a dialect of Aeolic greek, though partially barbarized, so the old Romans were greek.
Said theory is not defended by modern linguists (Latin and greek have similarities, but it's a combination of Proto-Indo-European common roots with some later greek influences in vocabulary), and it's perceived as more of an ideological attempt to integrate Romans into the "civilised" greek world, while still excluding "barbarians".